EAST COAST ODE TO HOWARD JARVIS

Tiny Kushner Dramaturge Guide complied by Lindsay Kujawa

HOWARD JARVIS (wikipedia article) Jarvis was born in Magna, , and died in , . He graduated from Utah State University. In Utah he had some political involvement working with his father's campaigns and his own. His father was a state Supreme Court judge and, unlike Jarvis, a member of the Democratic Party. Howard Jarvis was active in the Republican Party and also ran small town newspapers. Although raised Mormon, he smoked cigars and drank vodka as an adult. He moved to California in the 1930s due to a suggestion by . Jarvis bought his home at 515 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles for $8,000 in 1941. By 1976, it was assessed at $80,000. He married his third wife, Estelle Garcia, around 1965.

Jarvis was a Republican primary candidate for the U.S. Senate in California in 1962, but the nomination and the election went to the liberal Republican . Subsequently, he ran several times for Mayor of Los Angeles on an anti-tax platform and gained a reputation as a harsh critic of government. An Orange County businessman, he went on to lead the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and spearheaded Proposition 13, the California property tax-cutting initiative passed in 1978 which slashed property taxes by 57% and initiated a national tax revolt.

Jarvis and his wife collected tens of thousands of signatures to enable Prop. 13 to appear on a statewide ballot, for which he garnered national attention. The ballot measure passed with nearly two-thirds of the vote.Two years later, voters in enacted a similar measure.

Regarding the motives of Jarvis in promoting Proposition 13 and the role its passage had in rent control subsequently being enacted in most large cities in California, Greg Katz has written: "There was little doubt from his rhetoric that Howard Jarvis, who penned Prop. 13 with his on-again-off-again political ally Paul Gann, hated taxes of all kinds. But his intentions were, at best, turbid; Jarvis was at the time employed by the Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association as a lobbyist. In a fundraising letter to the landlords that employed him, he claimed, 'We are the biggest losers' if Prop. 13 fails. (Not to mention: The Yes on 13 headquarters were located in a Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association office.) He tried to persuade renters to vote for Prop. 13 by saying it would drive down rents, by decreasing the property taxes that landlords paid. Post-13 news reports found rents weren’t going down, despite Jarvis’s promises – apparently landlords were just pocketing their property tax savings. That revelation prompted many of the rent controls still in effect around California." San Francisco community activist Calvin Welch has stated "Jarvis was the father of rent control.” Mark Evanier has dubbed him a "horrible man" and summed up Jarvis' years as a lobbyist for landlords with these words: "He spent a lot of time 'n' money trying to ram through bills that said, in essence, that if I'm your landlord, I can do any damn thing I want to you, including tearing up contracts and raising your rent or evicting you whenever I feel like it."

In 1980, he had a cameo appearance in the film Airplane!, playing an incredibly patient taxicab passenger. This was an inside joke that people outside California were probably unaware of since Jarvis, a champion of fiscal responsibility, spent the entire movie sitting in an empty cab waiting for the driver to return, with the meter running all the while. Jarvis had the final line in the movie, which he said after the end credits. Still sitting in the cab with the fare at $113 and still rising (equivalent to $323 in 2014), having not moved at all, he looks at his watch and says "Well, I'll give him another twenty minutes, but that's it!"

OVERVIEW OF NEW YORK IN THE 1990’s

“By the final days of March 1990, New York was a city staggered - reeling from a crack-fueled cascade of soaring murders and plummeting morale.Flags flew at half-mast for the 87 victims of the Happy Land arson fire, but greater carnage loomed: The nation's murder capital suffered a record 2,245 homicides by year's end. City streets were awash in drugs and illegal weapons. Brazen dealers controlled entire intersections. Crack was king, with its subjects spread across the five boroughs. The inmates, in one case, actually ran the asylum: A convicted killer escapedRikers Island by driving off in a correction captain's blue station wagon.”

- JONATHAN LEMIRE , ROCCO PARASCANDOLA , LARRY MCSHANE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Saturday, April 10, 2010, 9:05 PM

During the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s New York was considered one of the world’s most dangerous city’s. During the late 80’s to early 90’s the city reached record crime rates due to the crack epidemic that took hold of the city. In 1990 there were 2,245 murders that took place in New York City alone. Beyond the high crime rate, corruption ran rampant within public service with government employees often turning a blind eye to serious issues ranging from mob crime to garbage services. New York’s streets were dangerous with the threat of stepping on an HIV/AIDS infected needle a terrifying reality. Times Square looks nothing like the shiny family friendly center it is today; instead it was filled with mob-run strip clubs and adults stores around every corner.

Since the early 90’s New York has changed drastically. While people are very polarized on their opinions of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crack down on crime, there is no arguing that his actions did lower crime and corruption rates throughout the city. When Guliani took office he set out with a mission to increase police vigilance of small petty crimes (drug dealing, small theft crimes, etc). Crime rates have dropped 80% since the early 90’s with 2013 setting a new record low of 333 homicides committed throughout the year. Crime rates not only saw a drop in New York City, but across the country with a 40% decrease in crime seen nationwide. In addition to Guiliani’s legacy of being tough on crime, he also can be attributed to the cleaning up of Times Square. When Disney’s Lion King was looking for a permanent location they refused to consider New York due to its anti-family atmosphere, especially around Times Square. Guiliani worked with City Officials and Disney to clean up the area and turn it into what is today.

Although Guliani’s legacy may have some remarkable moments, there has also been negative fallout. Since the early 90’s the New York State penitentiary systems has seen a 65% increase in occupancy with the majority of the prisoners being of minority backgrounds, especially young African-American males. New York has also turned from a blue collar city, to one targeted towards the wealthy. While it was once true that a middle-class family could live in Manhattan, that reality is now a thing of the past due to the astronomical increase in rent. Not only has New York City’s rent increased drastically, but many New Yorker’s feel the city is now marketed as a playground for the rich and as such has lost much of what made New York the eclectic city it once was.

NEW YORK CITY CRIMES IN THE NINETIES The New Yorker DECEMBER 5, 2012 BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN

Last week, the N.Y.P.D. made a cheerful and unexpected announcement: on Monday, November 26th, for “the first time in memory,” there hadn’t been a shooting, stabbing, or slashing anywhere in the five boroughs. (One man, a teen-ager from the Bronx, shot himself in the leg by accident; that didn’t count.) There was almost certainly weaponless violence last Monday, and it goes without saying that there’s been plenty of violence the rest of the year. But it’s also true that the city is less violent now than it’s been for nearly fifty years. In 1990, there were two thousand two hundred and forty-five murders in New York. This year, there are likely to be fewer than four hundred.

Throughout the nineteen-nineties, The New Yorker tracked this extraordinary turnaround. Barbara Goldsmith’s “Women on the Edge,” from 1993, gives you a rough idea of how high the stakes were in the early nineties. The article is a grim introduction to the routinely desperate world of New York City prostitution. Goldsmith shadows Dr. Joyce Wallace, one of the first doctors to study the AIDS epidemic, as she single-handedly tries to stop the spread of H.I.V. among New York City prostitutes. Wallace has used government grants and a corporate sponsorship from LifeStyles, the condom company, to cobble together an AIDS-prevention program: she drives around the city in a white Dodge van (the “LifeStyles Care-Van, Sponsored by LifeStyles Condoms”), offering H.I.V. tests, distributing condoms, running a needle- exchange program, and trying, often unsuccessfully, to get prostitutes off the streets and into shelters.

Wallace drives Goldsmith all over Manhattan, and each intersection seems more hopeless than the last. At Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, prostitutes wear fur coats over lingerie, take their johns to fancy hotels, and “disdain” Wallace’s condoms. (“Not my brand,” one woman says.) Chelsea is less orderly, and around the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, “parked Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Cadillac cars containing prostitutes at work have become a familiar sight.” On the Lower East Side, on upper Park Avenue, and in Williamsburg, “the line between prostitution and desperation becomes blurred”: there, prices are pegged to the drug market, usually to the price of a vial of crack. Women live in encampments, or in Dumpsters, in the lawless corners of the city’s grid. When Wallace wins a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar grant to open a drop-in center for prostitutes who are looking to get off the street, she leases 175 East Houston, at the corner of Houston and Allen. The year before, it had been a brothel, with iron bars around the stairwell—“so the johns wouldn’t toss the girls down the stairs,” she explains. Leasing the building turns out to have been unwise. In her rush to get the project off the ground, Wallace didn’t consider how the neighbors would react, and they are furious. But that’s par for the course, Goldsmith writes: “As in the early days of theAIDS crisis, when the establishment failed to respond, the burden of activism has fallen not to the most skilled or organized but to those who care.”

Jonathan Rubinstein’s “Survival in the Night,” also from 1993, sees New York’s lawlessness stealing off the street and into your apartment. It’s the end of the day, and Rubinstein is naked, in bed, reading and “listening to a blues program on WKCR,” when the unthinkable happens:

The door to the living room was almost open by the time I realized it was moving. Thinking my son had returned home from the Seder at his grandmother’s, I stared, smiling, anticipating a greeting. Moments passed. Nothing. Then, emerging from the dark, a pair of eyes whose size still fills my entire mind, a white shirt, and a silver gun pointing directly at me…. I said what I still think was the only appropriate thing to say: “Holy shit.” He stepped inside my bedroom and replied, “Do as you’re told or I will kill you.”

Rubinstein, an ex-cop, keeps a gun in his filing cabinet, but has no way to reach it. The burglar ties him up and begins searching the apartment. The two men make conversation. (“You like to fish?” the burglar asks, seeing some fishing rods in a corner; “I wish I was fishing now,” Rubinstein replies.) His son is out, he tells the man, and he’d really like it if this were over by the time he comes back. Eventually, the burglar leaves, with eighty dollars and a radio—only to return, surprising Rubinstein, who has rubbed his wrists bloody trying to get out of the restraints. “What’s wrong with your elevator?” he asks. “Listen, pal,” Rubinstein replies, “you just have to walk down like the rest of us.”

After the burglar leaves, Rubinstein starts to lose his cool. He rides along with the cops, and points out the man on the street so that they can arrest him. Over the next few weeks, he works with the police and the D.A.’s office to maximize the man’s sentence. All the while, his anger is rising; “the Event,” Rubinstein writes, “had taken control of my life.” He talks about it so much, and so vehemently, that he begins to alienate his friends. Then, subtly, his feelings start to change. He wonders at the desperation, almost certainly fuelled by drug addiction, that could have driven the man to invade his fifth-floor apartment. (The burglar must have climbed the fire escape, Rubinstein surmises, then swung on a “rotten iron shutter” into the open space of the alleyway, landing on a tiny ledge near an unlocked window.) The gun, it turns out, was incapable of firing, a bluff. And Rubinstein finds himself thinking back to the surprising gentleness of their exchanges. “If the gun in the filing cabinet had been in my hand I would have killed him,” Rubinstein writes. “I say this now, even as I recall his acts of civility towards me when I was entirely in his power.” Some years later, Rubinstein is volunteering at a needle- exchange program. He realizes that he’s looking for his burglar among the addicts, curious to know what’s become of him.

Much of The New Yorker’s crime reporting from the nineties is haunted by the troubling question that’s implicit in these stories: how much of the city’s crime problem can be solved through better policing, and how much must be solved, instead, through social reform? Crimes are offenses against society, but, when they become pervasive enough, they can gain a new meaning, and become criticisms of it. In “Quality and Equality,” a 1994 Comment, James Kunen expressed support for Mayor Giuliani’s new “broken windows” approach to policing— which had the police focussing on minor offenses, like vandalism—while also questioning its social cost. He points out that the N.Y.P.D.’s recently-published manifesto, “Reclaiming Public Spaces,” lists “dirt, graffiti, homeless people, noise” as factors that lower New Yorkers’ quality of life. The police, he wrote, “should not be in the business of doing everything”:

[N]ow, more than ever, that’s what they are called upon to do. There are no jobs, but you must not peddle. The soup kitchens may be closing down, but you must not beg. Those who fall between the hard place that is our conscience and the rock that is our heart we leave to the tender mercies of the cops. All problems are not law-enforcement problems. And the streets are not the only place to look for the disorders that threaten the quality of our life.

These concerns were warranted, but, looking back, it also seems as though it was hard to imagine just how far the crime rate could fall. In “The C.E.O. Cop,” his 1995 Profile of Giuliani’s Police Commissioner, William Bratton, James Lardner is taken aback by Bratton’s bold “guarantee” that crime rates will fall precipitously. But Bratton is convinced that, with better management and morale, the N.Y.P.D. can actually go on the offensive against crime. Bratton, Lardner writes, asked his commanders how much of a drop in crime they could envision. He fired the ones who named a figure like five per cent, and replaced them with ones who spoke about ten, fifteen, or twenty per cent declines. He bought officers new equipment, and gave precinct commanders more power.

Bratton implemented, as is often reported, a “broken windows” strategy. But he was also aided by his Deputy Police Commissioner, Jack Maple, who put in place a new, statistics-driven approach to policing. “The Crime Buster,” David Remnick’s 1997 Profile of Maple, refers to him as “the cop who cleaned up New York.” Maple, who started out as a Transit patrolman, was a genius— inventive and impulsive, he was so addicted to policing that he arrested people in his free time. He ran decoy squads in the subway: “cops,” Remnick writes, “posing, generically, as ‘the Jewish lawyer,’ ‘the blind man,’ ‘the casual couple,’” which were phenomenally successful in flushing out the muggers who worked in gangs called “wolf packs.” And he took the first steps toward using statistics to give police an edge:

He told anyone who would listen that until the entire police force got out of its rut—until officers got out of their patrol cars and started fighting crime instead of responding to 911 calls—until that happened, the crime rate would keep climbing. Maple started mapping strategies to fight crime, and papered his walls with fifty-five feet of hand-drawn maps he called the Charts of the Future. The charts detailed every stop on every subway line and every robbery that had been committed. The idea was obvious but somehow untested: go after the bad guys where the bad guys did their work and get them before they committed more crimes.

Eventually, Maple was taken out of Transit, and tasked with implementing his system city- wide. He called his new approach CompStat. In “The Wire,” the CompStat meetings are decadent and cynical, but in the nineties, in New York, combined with a newly energized, well- managed, fully-funded police force, they made a difference. And the changes at the N.Y.P.D. collided with other trends, like the consolidation of the crack market and the easing of a demographic bump which had made for a lot of young New Yorkers, to push crime lower. The resulting decline was so dramatic that, in 1996’s “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell proposed an additional explanation for the change. “There’s a puzzling gap between the scale of the demographic and policing changes,” he wrote, “and the scale of the decrease in crime”; one way to make sense of the change was to think of social problems as “behav[ing] like infectious agents.” Push the crime rate low enough, and the internal dynamics of the urban system take over, pushing it ever lower. Looking back on the nineties, of course, you can’t help but notice one problem that the N.Y.P.D. isn’t trying to solve: terrorism. By 2005, when William Finnegan wrote “The Terrorism Beat,” the department, under a new Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, had began retooling, staffing a thousand officers on counterterrorism between 2001 and 2005. It began posting officers abroad, in places like London and Israel, and recruiting native foreign- language speakers from its own ranks and from the city at large. (In terms of languages, Finnegan writes, the N.Y.P.D.’s resources rival the federal government’s.) Today’s challenges are scary in different ways. They are less local, and less visible. The nineties offer up a reassuring crime story; we don’t yet know how this new story will end.

WHAT REALLY CLEANED NEW YORK UP The Salon Thomas Rogers SATURDAY, NOV 19, 2011 09:00 AM PST

If you compare New York in 2011 to New York in 1990, it seems hard to believe that it’s the same city. In the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, New York was viewed as one of the world’s most dangerous metropolises — a cesspool of violence and danger depicted in gritty films like “The Warriors” and “Escape From New York.” Friends who lived here during that time talk of being terrified to use the subway, of being mugged outside their apartments, and an overwhelming tide of junkies. Thirty-one one of every 100,000 New Yorkers were murdered each year, and 3,668 were victims of larceny.

Today, in an astonishing twist, New York is one of the safest cities in the country. Its current homicide rate is 18 percent of its 1990 total — its auto theft rate is 6 percent. The drop exceeded the wildest dreams of crime experts of the 1990s, and it’s a testament to this transformation that New Yorkers now seem more likely to complain about the city’s dullness than about its criminality.

In his fascinating new book, “The City that Became Safe,” Franklin Zimring, a professor of law and chairman of the Criminal Justice Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley, looks at the real reasons behind that change — and his conclusions might surprise you. Contrary to popular belief, Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” bluster had little to do with it. Instead, it was a combination of strategic policing and harm reduction by the New York Police Department. Police targeted open-air drug markets, and went after guns, while leaving drug users largely alone. The implications of the strategy could make us revise not only the way we think about crime, but the way we think about our prison system and even human nature.

Salon spoke to Zimring over the phone about Giuliani’s crackdown, the unique nature of New York violent crime and what other cities can take away from this change.

How unexpected was New York’s decrease in crime over the last decade?What happened in the during the 1990s was itself a major surprise. After essentially not being able to make any substantial progress in crime control over three decades, all of the sudden crime dropped over an eight-year period by something close to 40 percent. Now what happened in New York City was essentially twice as much of a crime decline, a four-fifths drop from its 1990 peak. That is to say more than 80 percent of the homicide, the burglary, the robbery that New York was experiencing in 1990, New York is no longer bedeviled by. And the decline lasted twice as long as the national crime decline.

How significant is that kind of crime drop? It is absolutely unprecedented. That is to say, a city where there are no revolutionary changes in population, or institutions, or economy going from extremely high crime and violence to, by American standards, extremely low crime and modest-to-low interpersonal violence was something that we had never experienced before. That doesn’t mean that simply because it was unheard of people can’t very quickly take it for granted and forget that they ever had a problem.

I’m reminded of the Village Voice’s billboard campaign from a few years ago that celebrated the old crime-filled New York with slogans like “Where did all the junkies go?” It seemed a little perverse to me. The low crime environment in New York is taken for granted and crime is no longer such an interesting issue in the city. It’s no longer a media issue. It turns out that crime is like a toothache. You only think about dentists when your teeth hurt and the municipal teeth are no longer hurting.

I’ve always been under the impression that New York got a lot wealthier during that time, but as you point out, that’s not the case. How did New York change during that period? The big story in New York City is not just the huge change in crime, but the massive contrast between the very modest changes that happened in the city and the huge results. Yeah, there were 3- or 4,000 extra police by the end of the period, in a city of 8.3 million. That’s a pretty superficial change. There wasn’t a flood of new jobs, the schools didn’t get wonderful, economic equality is worse rather than better. The basic populations and processes of the city didn’t change, but those relatively minor changes had huge impact on crime.

So what does that tell us about the nature of crime? We used to have what I call a supply-side theory of crime. That is the notion that once people get in the habit of committing crime, of robberies, and burglaries, and drug sales, they are either going to be locked up or they are going to persist in criminality. That supply side theory of persistent criminality just animated all of our assumptions about what worked in crime control and what didn’t. That notion of persistence meant that we were very, very pessimistic about the capacity of police to make a dent in crime for a very simple reason; because police are temporary and our notion was that criminal propensities were more or less permanent. You send three cops to 125th and 8th Avenue and the criminals just go to 140th Street. Or you send a lot of cops on Tuesday, and the robbers strike on Thursday instead.

That was the assumption, and what we found out in essence was this: that if you send a lot of cops to 125th Street on Tuesday, that’s not only one less robbery on Tuesday, but that’s one less robbery in 2011 and the reason for that is that the things which determine criminal propensities are a lot more situational and contingent than we thought. If you say there isn’t going to be a robbery on Tuesday, that’s one less robbery in New York City. That doesn’t mean that people are saving it up for the long term.

Which means, in turn, the tremendous growth in the prison system we’ve witnessed over the last few decades is terribly misguided. The temporary solutions that police and policing can provide turn out to have permanent impact on crime. Sending people away for 28 years all of the sudden sounds inefficient because instead of being able to assume that they were going to be active criminals for all 28 years, that variability in criminal propensities means that our investment in locking them up provides much less assurance that we’re saving crime. Between 1990, which was the high point in New York City crime, and 2009 which is the end of the books measuring period, the percent of people released from prison who are reconvicted of a felony in three years, and I’m using that really as a measure of criminal activity, that percentage in 1990 was 28 percent. In 2006, which gives them three years on the street by 2009, the percentage of people reconvicted of a felony having been active criminals and been sent to prison and been released, drops from 28 percent to 10 percent. That means that the personal crime rate of former high-rate offenders has dropped 64 percent. In a way, that’s absolutely necessary if the general crime rate goes down by more than 80 percent, but what it says about our investment in prisons as long-term crime control, is all of the sudden the gains we got from locking people up, have also dropped 64 percent. So prison is a lot less cost-effective.

How does New York prisoner size compare to the rest of the country? Over the period from 1990 to 2009, the rate of imprisonment in the United States, outside of New York City, went up by 65 percent. Even though there was a general crime decline, we kept throwing people in prison. In New York City, the rate of imprisonment and jailing didn’t go up at all, it went down 28 percent. So what you have is that the one American city that did best in the crime control sweepstakes of the 1990s and the 21stcentury actually had less use of incarceration than everyplace else. If this were an experiment, what happened is that the kids who didn’t brush with Crest had vastly fewer cavities. This is a country that had only one answer to its crime problems for 45 years. This is a country that increased the number of people it locked up by sixfold over the 40 years after 1970. So in essence what New York has done was demonstrate that the major investment we were making in controlling crime was simultaneously inefficient and unnecessary.

There’s an assumption that the New York crime decline was tied to Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on small crimes — squeegee kid, and the homeless, and petty criminals. Is that true? When you come back and you count your change carefully on these histories, you are always going to find a mixture of myth and reality. The chief tactition of the police changes in New York City, of the crime-control part, was a character named Jack Maple, now deceased, who wrote a book in the late 1990s that was an extremely honest and very forthright analysis of what the problems were and what they did with policing. The combination of reading carefully the historical record and then doing a massive historical research leads to a number of very, very clear conclusions. Clear conclusion No. 1 is this: that what went on never was order-maintenance or broken-windows [zero tolerance] policing.

The broken windows theory, which was a James Q. Wilson and George Kelling theory of tremendous impact in the early 1980s, was that the signals you send that essentially repress non-serious crime make people feel better. The police essentially ignore the worst neighborhoods in the city, the ones with the highest rates of violence, they go to the marginal ones, the places that are at risk of becoming serious problems but haven’t made it all the way to the center of the second circle of crime-control hell yet. Because what Wilson and Kelling said about the highest crime areas, is that they were probably hopeless. Well, that’s the opposite of what the New York City police did.

If you’re going to drive the homicide rate down by 82 percent, you have to go to the hot spots where homicide and robbery and burglary keep happening. And that was the focus of the New York City police. And not only were they interested in the highest crime areas, but what they were interested in, the people they wanted to take off the streets, were not the people who were committing less serious crimes, they wanted to take the robbers and the burglars and the shooters off the streets. The way in which they did that is that they took suspicious persons and they instrumentally arrested them for small crimes.

“Suspicious persons” is a loaded term … Marijuana was not a priority of the New York City police, but they had a huge number of public marijuana arrests. Why was that? That was because they were only arresting minority males who looked to them like robbers and burglars and they used as a pretext the less serious crime arrest to find out whether the particular person they were arresting had a warrant our for a felony and was a bad actor. In the immortal words of Jack Maple, who wrote that book in the late ’90s, they were looking for sharks not for dolphins.

Now there are some real problems of selection and minority with that strategy, but having said that, it doesn’t do us any good to misconstrue what the strategy was and to announce that somehow it was the maintenance of order that created the high crime impact. The reason that order maintenance can’t do that is because serious crime is deeply more concentrated in the worse parts of the city than order- maintenance issues. So you have to decide where you are going to invest your resources. And what New York City’s police department did from Day One was to invest their resources where serious crime was.

Doesn’t it send a worrisome message to other cities, that potentially racist stop-and-frisk policies may have been so successful in New York? You bet it does. But there was a whole kitchen sink full of changes that took place in New York City policing. Now the question is, was all of this aggressiveness — focused on poor minority males in high-crime neighborhoods — necessary to these dramatically successful results? And the answer is a resounding “we don’t know.” We don’t know how necessary the most costly parts of aggressive policing are to the results of policing in New York. We don’t have a detailed crime control recipe book here. I’d love to have written the Julia Child cookbook of urban crime control. Here’s the recipe for an 80 percent reduction that will work in your neighborhood! We are way away from that. We don’t know how we can produce 80 percent in Toledo or in Seattle or wherever.

One thing you point out that was very important for the overall decline of crime in New York was the decline in open-air drug markets. The largest growth in police efforts during the 1990s was in narcotics. The narcotics squad was increased not by the 40 percent that was the police expansion, but by 137 percent between 1990 and 1999. And what the cops did was destroy public drug markets — places where ordinary citizens would have to stay away, places with incredible rates of homicide — and for a particular reason. If I’m a drug seller in a public drug market and you’re a drug seller in a public market, we’re both going to want to go to the corner where most of the customers are. But that means that we are going to have conflict about who gets the corner. And when you have conflict and you’re in the drug business, you’re generally armed and violence happens.

The good news is that drug violence went down tremendously. There are a couple of different ways in which the police department measures the number of killings associated with drug traffic in New York; both of those measures that they use are down more than 90 percent so that the streets themselves have been changed, people can walk there, and the number of dead bodies associated with illegal drug traffic has gone way, way down. Now what happened to the amount of drug use in New York City, to cocaine and heroine ingestion? And all of the indications that we have on that, and there are lots of ways of measuring it, suggest that illegal drug use was really relatively stable, that the amount of heroine and cocaine ingested in 2009 in New York is not hugely different from the percentage of the population using cocaine and heroine in 1990 or the amount of cocaine and heroine they use. Now our cocaine users are a little bit older in the later period there, but the big difference is between the drug use, which is relatively stable, and the drug violence, which has gone way down.

The hard-line notions of William Bennett, our first national drug czar, was that the only effective way to go after the costs, the violence, the HIV of drug abuse, would be to substantially reduce drug use. And that was the official policy in this country for many years. The opposite approach, the public health approach, was called harm reduction. And what the harm reduction advocates said, and these were usually people who were doctors or masters of public health, they said, Look, if you are interested in something like HIV transmission, go after that. And, among other things, they suggested to exchange clean needles for dirty ones. That was something that the all-out drug warriors hated. Now the New York City police strategy wasn’t an all-out war on drugs in which all drug arrests are created equal. They went after the harm-producing public drug markets and they invested all their resources in taking the most violence-prone aspects of drug use and targeting them. The focused priorities were on the costs associated with drugs, not the number of people who were taking drugs or the number of kilos of drugs.

One of the really interesting things that comes out of the book is that, although many different kinds of crime in New York have decreased dramatically, and yet violent crime remains proportionally high when you compare them to cities like Toronto and Paris. Does this mean there is a different kind of criminal in New York City — a more violent one? Fifteen years ago Gordon Hawkins and I published a book called “Crime Is Not the Problem,” about lethal violence in the United States. The big contrast in New York after its crime decline is this: Everything went way down, but when you compare this tremendously successful crime control effort in an American city with what the situation is in other world capitals, you get a very different contrast. For auto theft and for burglary, the rates of crime and presumably the number of active criminals in New York City is less than it is in London, is less than it is in Paris, or in Toronto, or in Montreal. We have less property crime and presumably less property criminals than other major Western cities. But when you look at our homicide and robbery rates, they are still higher in New York City and would be higher in Los Angeles and other American cities than in Western capitals.

And the reason for that may explain the cultural limits of what I have been calling situational and contingent crime control. There is simply more of a streak of violence in American urban populations and what that suggests is that while we have been tremendously successful in crime and violence reduction using just situational and contingent, essentially superficial remedies, at some point the effectiveness of those superficial remedies ends. You are going to scrape bottom. The homicide rate in New York City went from 30 per 100,000 to under six per 100,000. That’s phenomenal. If you had asked me 20 years ago whether that were possible, I would have assured it wasn’t. But with that under six per 100,000 I think you start bumping up against the limits of what happens in a country that still has a lot of guns and an awful lot of structural inequality, and an awful lot of social isolation in urban ghetto and barrio areas.

We have to be talking about making deeper changes before we get to larger progress. Nothing is going to make New York City into Tokyo or Hong Kong or Beijing. Cultures are different and susceptibility to levels of violence as a problem-solving mechanism is much more deeply ingrained in the American city than in many areas of the modern world. Most of the extreme problems of violence as well as crime that New York was experiencing in 1990, and that other American cities had been experiencing on a chronic level, can be effectively addressed without the basic progress that we all think would be better. So we don’t have to fix the schools, and we don’t have to fix the economy, and we don’t have to fix the culture to reduce 80 percent of our violence problem. That’s wonderful news. It still would be a good idea to fix the culture, and the economy, and the schools, but we’ve got more time to do it and more freedom to experiment with those deeper substantive changes because we are living in a world where crime would be much less of a problem.